Posts tagged travel

Russia's Roscosmos space agency is in a bind. It makes money ferrying American astronauts to the International Space Station, but it's going to have a lot of unclaimed seats once NASA starts using capsules from Boeing and SpaceX. The solution? It's resuming space tourism. When 2018 rolls around, E...

Wish your Xbox One could teach you more vocabulary than just "noob" or "get rekt?" It can now. Rosetta Stone has announced an Xbox One app that will teach you English or Spanish through simulated travel experiences. It also has phrase books, study advice, and cultural tips to keep you in locals' g...

While the US might be leading the race to open the first commercial spaceports, the UK is working hard to close the gap. More than six months after the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) shortlisted eight potential spaceport locations, the government today backed plans to make one a reality....

Richard Branson knows how to make a first impression. The first thing I saw when I arrived at Virgin's debut hotel was a statuesque blonde in a bright-red trench coat stepping out of a matching-hued Tesla, with a photographer documenting the whole ordeal. The photographer was there for glamour sho...

Looking to extend its reach with folks who book travel reservations online, Expedia is snatching up the competition with a quickness. Today, the web-based travel agency announced that it's purchasing Orbitz for around $1.6 billion, so the most popular option in the US for searching flights, hotels...

It's pretty easy to find local restaurants using Google Maps, but figuring out if they're any good or not? Most folks turn to Yelp or TripAdvisor, which have larger, more hardcore user communities. But Google has just done a makeover on its City Experts service, by switching the name to Local Guid...

WiFi Map is a crowdsourced tool for finding all of the Wi-Fi hotspots in your area as well as the passwords to certain security-protected networks. Anyone in the area is able to comment on a WiFi network and leave the password for others to use, plus WiFi Map lets you save these in a collection s...

Many have tried pushing location-sharing services to the mainstream and pretty much all attempts have failed. Almost on the brink of true success, Foursquare and Swarm arguably has yet to capture the interest of the masses. Even Apple tried with Find My Friends and didn't get very far with it. Ar...

How much does it cost to buy one of the biggest brands in online travel? Only about $280 million, as it turns out: That's how much Expedia paid in cash to acquire Travelocity today from its parent company Sabre Corporation (no relation to these the makers of the critically panned Pyramid). So what...

You can conquer the world if you try hard enough. I'm sure some adult told you that at one point when you were younger. It seems like kind of a stretch though, doesn't it? Well, conquering the physical world is probably best left off your bucket list. It might be nice to conquer the world in virt...

The next time you're on a trip, you may have something to watch on the hotel room TV besides the usual so-so channels and on-demand movies. Marriott has confirmed to Bloomberg that it's trialing access to streaming services like Hulu, Netflix and Pandora on TVs in eight of its hotels. It's not cer...

Messages in a bottle evoke a feeling of awe and power in many of us because such a simple message has the ability to go a very long way. Chances are it'll end up somewhere you would never imagine, but it's fascinating to know where and the impact it could have. That's the concept behind Ripple, a...

Lingopal 44 is a language translation app that acts as a travel companion. Rather than just automatically translate any words or phrases you type in the app, it provides a lengthy, categorized list of common words and phrases to listen to and use on demand. Lingopal 44 supports - you guessed it -...

It's easy to understand why Gogo would curb video streaming given the limited headroom on its current in-flight WiFi service. You don't want to miss important email just because someone in row 29 is watching the latest Epic Rap Battle, after all. However, the company's approach to keeping you off ...

Travelers love to not only capture their journeys for future reference, but share photos, videos, and details of daily events with others. Blogging tools like WordPress can be problematic for those who only travel on occasion, and emailing or messaging photos and videos can result in an overload for...

So you've decided to make some extra money renting out your apartment on Airbnb, only to realize that you need your own place to stay in the meantime. Don't worry, there's a service for that. Welcome to CISWYWIRMPOA? (Can I Stay with You While I Rent My Place on Airbnb?), a site that lets you arra...

Stayful is a travel app that finds hotels in a number of cities across North America based on exactly what you're looking for, then gets you the best price possible. Browse photos of the hotels, view a list of amenities and reasons why you might like your stay there, then quickly make a reservati...

Anyone who knows me understands that I live with an all-consuming travel lust. There's nothing I like more than going out to see what else is in the world. It's a prohibitively expensive fascination, so I'm often forced to accept compromises. RoundMe for iPhone (free) is so lovely in its executi...

Now that Apple finally has a large smartphone, it's venturing into places that were previously off-limits. Case in point: United has announced that all of its 23,000 "mainline" flight attendants will get the iPhone 6 Plus in the second quarter of 2015. Staff will initially use the supersized hands...

As Carl Sagan once said, "There are billions and billions of travel apps in the App Store." I'm paraphrasing, but you get the sentiment. Giants like Kayak (which I love) and Travelocity are quite visible while others get less attention. Today I want to point out Roomlia (free) as it's got some v...